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Barbara Lindsey

Open university: Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT's Media Lab (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...open-university

openeducation openaccess highered bwct mitmedialab MIT JoiIto

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
  • in which any bright talent anywhere, academically qualified or not, can be part of the world's leading "antidisciplinary" research lab. "Opening up the lab is more about expanding our reach and creating our network," explains Ito, appointed director in April 2011.
  • as Ito sees it, the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress. "In the old days, being relevant was writing academic papers. Today, if people can't find you on the internet, if they're not talking about you in Rwanda, you're irrelevant. That's the worst thing in the world for any researcher. The people inventing things might be in Kenya, and they go to the internet and search. Funders do the same thing. The old, traditional academic channel is not a good channel for attracting attention, funding, people, or preventing other people from competing with you.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."
  • "Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
  • It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."
  • As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".
  • There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."
  • "We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.
  • Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."
  • Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."
  • In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."
  • So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."
Barbara Lindsey

'Augmented Reality' on Smartphones Brings Teaching Down to Earth - Technology - The Chr... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65991

augmented reality languagelearning languages learning students pbl

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Arguments for Augmentation The researchers and educators in this small, emerging field see clear advantages to using real-world sites as the backdrop for educational games. A major goal of Mentira is to motivate students "to get their heads out of the textbook" by showing them that language has a vibrant local context, Ms. Sykes says. By setting the story in a nearby neighborhood, she and Mr. Holden took advantage of its historic sites and folklore to integrate learning about its history and culture into the game
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 24 Jun 10
       
      Mentria could also be a good model for foreign language teachers or instructors of culture courses.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 18 Dec 10
       
      Thank you very much for bookmarking this to our group, Chenwen!
  • Mr. Gagnon is the lead developer of a software tool called ARIS, or Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. ARIS lets designers link text, images, video, or audio to a physical location, making the real world into a map of virtual characters and objects that people can navigate with iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches.
  • The open-source tool,
Barbara Lindsey

Cell phone novels come of age › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion - 0 views

www.japantoday.com/...cell-phone-novels-come-of-age

mobile cellphones japan novels

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • “Teenage girls began messaging with pagers in the early ’90s,” says Mizuko Ito, a research scientist who studies cell phone use among Japanese youth. “Because of this, Japan was the first country to have widespread mobile communications, even before mobile phones became affordable and popular.” Ito sees in the rise of cell phone novels a high degree of media and gadget literacy, a cultural willingness to experiment with new technologies, and a desire for private space and intimate communication.
  • The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.
  • Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author with a cell phone novel publishing deal enjoyed a first run of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Indeed, cell phone novels do not go through the editorial selection process; they first become popular with readers and then are published based on their ability to please a crowd. This rawness is at once their appeal and a major hurdle keeping the emergent genre from maturing.
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 1 views

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons knowledgable

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 10
       
      This is key to understanding Wikipedia.
Barbara Lindsey

Opportunities for Creating the Future of Learning - 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future ... - 0 views

www.futureofed.org/...index.aspx

forcase future learning knowledgeworks

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • It remains to be seen whether new learning agents and traditionally certified teachers will cooperate or compete.
  • Secondly, it emphasizes the need for learning to be an ongoing process whereby we all become engaged citizens of a global society. T
  • By embracing technologies of cooperation, prototyping new models of learning, and cultivating open and collaborative approaches to leadership, “amplified” educators and learners will become the organizational “superheroes” of schools and districts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The globalization of open learning systems characterized by cooperative resource creation, evaluation, and sharing will change how educational institutions view their roles and will offer new forms of value in the global learning ecosystem.
  • The result will be an emerging toolset for designing personalized, learner-centered experiences and environments that reflect the differentiation among learners instead of forcing compliance to an average learning style and level of performance.
  • As the hierarchical structure of education splinters, traditional top-down movements of authority, knowledge, and power will unravel. Before new patterns get established, it will seem as if a host of new species has been introduced into the learning ecosystem. Authority will be a hotly contested resource, and there will be the potential for conflict and distrust.
  • Learning geographies will be accessible to communities through a range of key tools, such as data aggregated from disparate sources, geo-coded data linking learning resources and educational information to specific community locations, and visualization tools that help communicate such information in easily understood visual and graphic forms. Such information will often contain multiple layers of data (for example, school performance statistics, poverty rates, and the degree of access to fresh food).
  • These new dimensions of learning geographies will require new core skills. Among them will be navigating new visual cartographies, identifying learning resources in previously unexpected places, leveraging networks to take advantage of learning opportunities, and creating flexible educational infrastructures that can make use of dispersed community resources. Through enhanced visibility and accessibility, learning geographies will bring new transparency to issues of equity in learning.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
     
    By embracing technologies of cooperation, prototyping new models of learning, and cultivating open and collaborative approaches to leadership, "amplified" educators and learners will become the organizational "superheroes" of schools and districts.
Barbara Lindsey

A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...) - John Ba... - 0 views

battellemedia.com/...reator_of_that_wonderful_video

interview wesch machineusingus

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the dance and that we are all here in this webscape dancing and playing around with ideas. The best dancers are those that find a way to “lose themselves” in the music – pushing the limits of the dance without fear of tripping or falling because they know that it is all part of the dance.
  • On the next 10-20 years and social networking ... I think this will greatly depend on the structure of those social networking tools and what kinds of communication are made possible with these tools. For example, on Facebook there are “walls” and “discussion groups.” Both of these sections are for human communication, but they are structured differently and therefore elicit different kinds of conversations. Furthermore, they are used in ways beyond how they were intended. Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
       
      "All human relationships are mediated by communication."
  • if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself.
  • wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
     
    Michael Wesch explains the purpose of his video, The Machine is Us/ing Us
Barbara Lindsey

Online education evolves as advances in technology make major impact - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010092405983_3.html

online education learning2.0 highered

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • In just the last few years, the emergence of multi-functional mobile phones and tablets have untethered the Internet from desktop computers, allowing online learning to take place anywhere with an Internet or cellular connection.
  • "What the iPad does is give you a much more portable canvas . . . you can already see the trend of portable learning and learning on demand, so that's huge," Singer said. "These new devices are going to speed it up."
Barbara Lindsey

Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities | Common Craft - Explanations In Plai... - 0 views

www.commoncraft.com/...000834.html

collaboration community lefever networking socialnetworking

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Oct 07 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Oct 07
       
      Important aspect of social networking
  • In most traditional online communities, members have profiles that may display a picture, location, recent posts and membership tenure at most. These profiles can provide valuable context to the community, but they are often peripheral to the discussions and remain somewhat hidden.
  • In contrast, social networking communities have elevated the user profile to become more like a user homepage that displays a very rich and contextual set of information. The member home pages are not peripheral to the discussions or a subset of the community; they are at the very core of the system.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In traditional online communities, discussion is the center of the interaction and identity building. Members create relationships (and their own community identities) based on information they post in online discussions
  • identities can be built based on the display of the member’s choices of memberships in forums and connections to other people (among other things) on their home page.
  • Relationships in traditional communities are rarely made explicit.
  • Social networking, on the other hand, enables individual members to share explicit relationships with people and forums. Members use their home pages as rich representations of their preferences- which enable them to express their identity through explicitly shared forum membership and connections to other members.
  • Often, traditional online communities are managed so that new forums are built within a specific structure
  • An example of bucketed forums may be Technology-->Internet-->Online Communities-->Moderation Techniques-->Dealing with Spammers.
  • In social networking, the creation of new forums is done in a more emergent way and within a flatter hierarchy. A single member is free to create a new forum without placing it into a preset hierarchy.
  • New forums are a child of the whole system instead of being a child of a more general branch of the system. As new forums gain membership/popularity, they have equal opportunity to gain visibility in the system, similar to the weblog community.
  • Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation. Members
  • Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation.
  • The connections are held together by explicit relationships (people links) and interests (forum links) and do not depend on discussion content.
Barbara Lindsey

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07awareness-t.html

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Sep 08 - Cached
  • “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 18 Sep 08
       
      Is this perhaps the same concern educators have and thus why they hesitate to adopt these social networks for teaching and research? Are they concerned about opening up their research and teaching and if so, is that, at times, justified?
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 26 Apr 10
       
      I would answer with a yes. The emergence of technology, or "new" technology, has always presented threats to what people are accustomed to. Educators are no exceptions. They hesitate to adopt social networks because they know they can never think like before or follow the traditions they feel "safe" with, once they decide to give it a try. They would have to re-define their philosophy and revise teaching approaches. It means "great change" to open up teaching possibilities, and it follows that they are insecure because these networks push them out of their comfort zone. Yet, I would disagree that fear justifies the reluctance to try out new possibilities to teach. Insecurity originates from lack of knowledge. I believe more practical knowledge and training sessions would help a lot to relieve the discomfort. They would know how the networks function and how to benefit from them.
  • when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
  • Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
  • Twitters
  • ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.
  • when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.
Barbara Lindsey

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration - 0 views

www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08 - Cached
  • hey are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.
  • It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.
  • They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.
  • Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources.
  • he majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.
  • ree strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources
  • we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement.
  • Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.
  • elease their resources openly.
  • Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.
  • governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.
  • These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves.
  • We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.
  • we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0: beyond the buzz words | 4 Jun 2007 | ComputerWeekly.com - 0 views

www.computerweekly.com/...-2.0-beyond-the-buzz-words.htm

web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Lee Bryant, one of the founders of Headshift, says the network effect is the difference. Traditional applications, such as groupware, became slower the more people used them, he says. With Web 2.0 applications the reverse is true: the more people use them, the more effective they become.
  • “You influence each other, so that if you use a social tagging system, for example, themes start to emerge and other people pick up on them and you get these positive feedback loops. It is that difference that leads to the network effect.”
  • These technologies are mostly just HTML and Javascript web pages designed to offer a more streamlined user experience, sitting atop a relational data layer used to feed back user-contributed data in new ways.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “We suddenly have enough bandwidth, memory and computing power around these net-centric platforms,” he says. This means that the “people-to-people” concept that Web 1.0 wanted to accomplish can be supported, but with software interfaces that make it easier to contribute.
  • Seely Brown’s project-by-project approach is well-advised. “Start by putting together a decent collection of RSS feeds relevant to your project,” says Bryant. Then, enabling the posting and sharing of bookmarks will help glean knowledge from the project team. Complementing this with blogs will enable people to spend more time on those elements from the bookmarks and feeds that are particularly relevant and need further articulation.
  • Understanding the difference between consuming newsfeeds and consuming e-mail demonstrates a wider cultural shift that needs to take place in Web 2.0-savvy organisations. Generally, e-mails demand focused attention. They are processed in sequence and each takes a couple of minutes (or more) from your day. Handling newsfeeds and blog posts in that way would make you unproductive, says Bryant. They require a “river of news” approach, in which workers skim large amounts of information for helpful nuggets. Social tagging helps to naturally elevate certain topics above others by making them more popular.Finally, a wiki will help escalate blog discussion to more collaborative working, as needed. This has certainly been Ward’s experience: “The way the sites tend to work is that the blog is where people have a dialogue, but if it moves into more detailed work, it moves into the wiki,” she says.
Barbara Lindsey

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...group_enemy.html

social networking

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Apr 08 - Cached
  • April 24, 2003
  • I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups.
  • definition of social software
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • It's software that supports group interaction
  • how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
  • Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
  • We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.
  • If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
  • So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast.
  • So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
  • You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else.
  • The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave.
  • That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
  • Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
  • This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups.
  • what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group.
  • there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.
  • The first is sex talk,
  • second basic pattern
  • The identification and vilification of external enemies.
  • So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
  • third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration
  • The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique.
  • So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
  • He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
  • technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
  • Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
  • What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters.
  • This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
  • nd the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
  • As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
  • The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
  • So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.
  • It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern. We got the weblog pattern in around '96 with Drudge. We got weblog platforms starting in '98. The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it's going to change everything.
  • Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries? I don't know. It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas. So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.
  • A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.
  • Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.
  • You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."
  • It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
  • And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity.
  • In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
  • But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.
  • And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.
  • There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running. Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress. We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.
  • The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it's going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.
  • It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like "Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki. So now you can get at them." It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory. This is new. These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.
  • "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends."
  • The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
  • Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
  • So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
  • Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
  • But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
  • The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations
  • And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority. So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.
  • All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. A
  • If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
  • Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity.
  • Three, you need barriers to participation.
  • It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
  • The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
  • Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to another
  • If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are. And if you do me a favor, I'll remember it. And I won't store it in the front of my brain, I'll store it here, in the back. I'll just get a good feeling next time I get email from you; I won't even remember why. And if you do me a disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb, and I won't even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen,
Celeste Arrieta

Collaborative Editing « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Int... - 3 views

beyondwebct.wordpress.com/...collaborative-editing-3

collaborative blogs wikis question

shared by Celeste Arrieta on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • In what ways do the readings for this week provide an insight into their potential use in educational settings? In what ways could they support the learning goals you have for your students? What do these venues for collaboration and resource sharing mean for you as an educator and scholar? What questions do they raise for you?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      Questions to explore for today's class
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 15 Feb 10
       
      Diigo & Zotero are really useful tools to do research.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      We should try to tease out the similarities and differences between these two tools and when and how one would use each. For some tools it is just a matter of personal preference, say between using pbworks versus wikispaces in creating a wiki. Do you think the same could be said here or are there critical differences?
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 16 Feb 10
       
      I think Diigo provides a wide variety of possibilities. Zotero is also useful and maybe it's easier to learn how to use it. But when I tried to find groups and information on my specific field, Zotero didn't show many.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      Celeste, I wonder if part of the reason why you couldn't find groups or specific information in your area of interest is because this part of Zotero is relatively new and that faculty in the humanities, in particular, are not 'rewarded' in the same way as those in the sciences are for collaborating. Do you think humanities faculty regularly collaborate on research currently? Do you know how their scholarly work is evaluated in this regard? What do you think of these new learning and scholarship opportunities and how they might impact you? Once you all have had a chance to use both for a while, I wonder if distinct differences between Diigo and Zotero will begin to emerge for you?
Barbara Lindsey

Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 0 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=220

pln learning students cck09 siemens

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
  • Traditional courses provide a coherent view of a subject. This view is shaped by “learning outcomes” (or objectives).
  • This cozy comfortable world of outcomes-instruction-assessment alignment exists only in education. In all other areas of life, ambiguity, uncertainty, and unkowns reign.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.
  • How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?
  • I’ve come to view teaching as a critical and needed activity in the chaotic and ambiguous information climate created by networks. In the future, however, the role of the teacher, the educator, will be dramatically different from the current norm. Views of teaching, of learner roles, of literacies, of expertise, of control, and of pedagogy are knotted together. Untying one requires untying the entire model.
  • Most likely, a teacher will be one of the more prominent nodes in a learner’s network. Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.
  • A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.
  • The curator, in a learning context, arranges key elements of a subject in such a manner that learners will “bump into” them throughout the course. Instead of explicitly stating “you must know this”, the curator includes critical course concepts in her dialogue with learners, her comments on blog posts, her in-class discussions, and in her personal reflections. As learners grow their own networks of understanding, frequent encounters with conceptual artifacts shared by the teacher will begin to resonate.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Feb 10
       
      Can you see this as a viable possibility?
  • When I first started learning about the internet (pre-web days), I felt like I had stepped into a alternate realm with its own norms of behaviour and conduct. Bulletin boards and chat rooms presented a challenging mix of navigating social protocols while developing technical skills. By engaging with these conversation spaces – and forming a few tentative connections with others – I was able to find a precarious foothold in the online medium.
  • Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.
  • Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Feb 10
       
      This would really change how courses are currently taught. How would current course, program, departmental, school-wide assessments, evaluations react?
  • Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.
  • Filtering can be done in explicit ways – such as selecting readings around course topics – or in less obvious ways – such as writing summary blog posts around topics. Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.
  • During CCK08/09, one of Stephen’s statements that resonated with many learners centers on modelling as a teaching practice: “To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and to reflect.”
  • Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.
  • Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of have a presence in order to participate in networks. To teach well in networks – to weave a narrative of coherence with learners – requires a point of presence.
  • In CCK08/09, we used The Daily, the connectivism blog, elearnspace, OLDaily, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Second Life, and numerous other tools to connect with learners. Persistent presence in the learning network is needed for the teacher to amplify, curate, aggregate, and filter content and to model critical thinking and cognitive attributes that reflect the needs of a discipline.
  • We’re
  • We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment. My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.
  • Aggregation had so much potential. And yet has delivered relatively little over the last decade.
  • Perhaps we need to spend more time in information abundant environments before we turn to aggregation as a means of making sense of the landscape.
  • I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11
       
      Would you welcome this kind of feedback on your private exchanges?
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...open-content

HorizonReport opencontent

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it.
  • As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.
  • collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content,
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the notion of open content is to take advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of it.
  • The role of open content producers has evolved as well, away from the idea of authoritative repositories of content and towards the broader notion of content being both free and ubiquitous.
  • schools like Tufts University (and many others) now consider making their course materials available to the public a social responsibility.
  • Many believe that reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and a broad view of what constitutes scholarly publication are key challenges that institutions need to solve.
  • learning to find useful resources within a given discipline, assess the quality of content available, and repurpose them in support of a learning or research objective are in and of themselves valuable skills for any emerging scholar, and many adherents of open content list that aspect among the reasons they support the use of shareable materials.
  • Open content shifts the learning equation in a number of interesting ways; the most important is that its use promotes a set of skills that are critical in maintaining currency in any discipline — the ability to find, evaluate, and put new information to use.
  • Communities of practice and learning communities have formed around open content in a great many disciplines, and provide practitioners and independent learners alike an avenue for continuing education.
  • Art History. Smarthistory, an open educational resource dedicated to the study of art, seeks to replace traditional art history textbooks with an interactive, well-organized website. Search by time period, style, or artist (http://smarthistory.org).
  • American Literature before 1860 http://enh241.wetpaint.com Students in this course, held at Mesa Community College, contribute to the open course material as part of their research. MCC also features a number of lectures on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/user/mesacc#p/p).
  • Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/ The Open Learning Initiative offers instructor-led and self-paced courses; any instructor may teach with the materials, regardless of affiliation. In addition, the courses include student assessment and intelligent tutoring capability.
  • Connexions http://cnx.org Connexions offers small modules of information and encourages users to piece together these chunks to meet their individual needs.
  • eScholarship: University of California http://escholarship.org/about_escholarship.html eScholarship provides peer review and publishing for scholarly articles, books, and papers, using an open content model. The service also includes tools for dissemination and research.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes lectures and materials from most of its undergraduate and graduate courses online, where they are freely available for self-study.
  • Open.Michigan’s dScribe Project https://open.umich.edu/projects/oer.php The University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan initiative houses several open content projects. One, dScribe, is a student-centered approach to creating open content. Students work with faculty to select and vet resources, easing the staffing and cost burden of content creation while involving the students in developing materials for themselves and their peers.
  • Center for Social Media Publishes New Code of Best Practices in OCW http://criticalcommons.org/blog/content/center-for-social-media-publishes-new-code-of-best-practices-in-ocw (Critical Commons, 25 October 2009.) The advocacy group Critical Commons seeks to promote the use of media in open educational resources. Their Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare is a guide for content developers who want to include fair-use material in their offerings.
  • Flat World Knowledge: A Disruptive Business Model http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge-a-disruptive-business-model/ (David Weir, BNET, 20 August 2009.) Flat World Knowledge is enjoying rapid growth, from 1,000 students in the spring of 2009 to 40,000 in the fall semester using their materials. The company’s business model pays a higher royalty percentage to textbook authors and charges students a great deal less than traditional publishers.
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » Key Trends - 0 views

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HorizonReport keytrends

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount. Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they will live, the central role of the university when it achieved its modern form in the 14th century, is again at the forefront.
  • The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.
  • Over the past few years, the emergence of a raft of new (and often free) tools has made collaboration easier than at any other point in history.
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